3 Reasons Social Media Makes the World a Smaller Place

More amazing outcomes from my trip to South Africa, making me believe even more in the power of social media marketing to help small businesses grow (excerpted from my soon to be released book: Stress Free Media: How to Harness the Power of the Internet to Gain a Global Presence):

“He’s in Johannesburg? Ask him if he does house remodeling,” said Linda over Skype during our regular Monday night mastermind call.

“Okay.” I typed the question into the open chat box on Facebook and waited for an answer.

I relayed the answer to Linda and asked her why she wanted to know what kind of real estate investing he did. She answered that she knew a construction project manager in Pretoria, just north of Johannesburg, who was looking for work. When I relayed this to Rebaone, he immediately asked for John’s contact information because he was preparing to bid on an apartment building that needed work and he wanted to have a contractor come look at the property to assess the extent and cost of the updates that would be needed.

Before the mastermind call was over, I had connected Rebaone with John and was feeling pretty excited about making this connection. In and of itself, it may not seem to extraordinary, certainly not a big enough deal to start a book, but what I left out was the fact that Linda was calling in from Florida, I was in the Bronx in New York and we had folks on the mastermind call in Peru, North Carolina and California. So we were able to make a global connection between a real estate investor in Johannesburg and a construction project manager in Pretoria. It was an incredible evening, one that solidified my commitment to being more globally focused and made me realize on a very personal level the power of the internet and social media in particular.

If you read my last blog post you will know that I was recently in Johannesburg connecting with entrepreneurs from across that continent and the globe. In all my discussions with small business owners I still come across those that are resistant to social media regardless of where they are in the world or where they are in their business. So here are the 3 things I tell them to get them on board:

Social media allows you to connect with your customers or clients on a personal level,

Personal connections are loyal to you and your brand, and

Social proof (in the form of recommendations from your followers) is much more powerful than paid ads in today’s sales environment.

Once they get these three fundamental benefits of social media marketing, we can begin a real conversation about why they need to be on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. I will go into this in more depth in the book (so make sure you buy it!) but this is the starting point that gets pretty much every business owner interested in exploring social media for their business.